“God conceals the revelation of his word in the hiding place of his glory.”
Proverbs 25:2, TPT
“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the Lord. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”
Isaiah 55:8,9 TPT
”I give you this eternal truth: I have existed long before Abraham was born, for I AM!”
John 8:58, TPT
“Throughout our history God has spoken to our ancestors by his prophets in many different ways. The revelation he gave them was only a fragment at a time, building one truth upon another.”
Hebrews 1:1 TPT
Ooh! The maddening, mysterious nature of God! These verses are but a small sampling of curiosity-provoking statements in His Word. Many thousands of theologians have invested many thousands of hours searching out the fuller meaning of these, and other, passages. At least as many pages have been published with their findings, or their best take on their findings. Bible translators, too, have spent lifetimes toiling over these ‘glory of God’ texts, prayerfully attempting to faithfully convey the central intent of each. The disciples, in direct, heart-to-heart relationship with Jesus himself, had to contend with truths miles beyond their understanding, their no-rabbinic-school grasp. And now it’s our turn. Our assignment, (massively) aided by the Holy Spirit, is to bring Biblical truth to light, to struggle through our fog, to get a grasp.
I can picture the disciples, during the otherworldly days immediately following the Resurrection, spending time reliving the many things Jesus had said to them, the many times he gently chided them, the surprising things he chose to do, and not do, the incredible teachings to the huge crowds that would gather around him. In their day, there were no written mystery novels, but there were plenty of Jesus mysteries to deal with. Jesus’ open displeasure with the religious rulers, his exposing of their hypocrisy, his anger at their deliberate abuse of the lonely, the foreigner, the widows, even using their own ‘laws’ to ignore their responsibility to their own parents, all these things scared the sandals off his disciples. No one had ever dared take on this elite class within Judaism, and with such an authoritative tone! What were the disciples to make of all this? How were they to pull together this multitude of threads, with love (or was it joy?) seeming to be somehow at the very center? And how would that translate into their lives moving forward?
That is our challenge as well. How do we bushwhack through all we’ve believed, all we’ve received, to arrive at a cohesive whole? What is that one, mysterious, thing? PD
